Poems examine truth, fiction, the imagination, family life, love, and mortality.

The letters H, v., and O are central to Harrison's poetry. "H" in the play "The Big H," and many of Harrison's poems on language and class, stands for dropped aitches--missed rungs in his "ladder of aspiration," and for the chain of association he makes from the [h]owl of the Leeds City coat of arms to Herod, H-block, H-bomb, and Hiroshima. "H" is also celebrated in its absence, in loving reaffirmations of the bonds of dialect, class, and family. The verses/versus of Harrison's most controversial piece, "v.," are echoed in the "v-signs" and other invective of the angry dispossessed to whom his polyphonic writing gives a voice. "V" also stands for victory--the dearly-bought victories of wars, explored with the concomitant themes of imperialism and political propaganda. The black O haunts Harrison's work. The abyss; the nothingness of death, the extinction of personality, of art, of languages, of species, perhaps even of humankind; is figured in black burn-out circles, pits, mines, and empty skies. Its obverse is another O, where life is affirmed--the acting circle of Harrison's theatre work. Lucid and trenchant, Byrne's study is now the benchmark for students of Harrison's work.

Interpreting specific poems by some of the best known Chicano writers, this book studies the central aesthetic and thematic concerns recent Chicano poetry addresses. Drawing on current theories of postmodernity and postcoloniality, it places a "minority" literature within the central concerns of contemporary literary and cultural studies. The book addresses the most important issues related to Chicano identity, especially focusing on the contribution women writers and thinkers have made in articulating this identity.